Geithner’s Crimes Through AIG – Will The Truth Come Out
by ilene - February 24th, 2011 11:29 pm
Courtesy of The Daily Bail
Geithner’s Crimes Through AIG – Will The Truth Come Out
Video – Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert
At issue is Tim Geithner’s criminal behavior in orchestrating the AIG bailout to favor Goldman Sachs through counterparty payouts at par, and then the massive cover-up.
Further reading…
- Who Is Dan Jester And Why Did Tim Geithner Call Him 103 Times During The Financial Meltdown Of 2008?
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Presenting The TVIX: A Double Leveraged VIX ETF
by ilene - November 22nd, 2010 12:13 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden: Presenting The TVIX: A Double Leveraged VIX ETF
Ever feel like this market just does not provide enough unique and suicidal ways for you to lose your hard stolen money within nanoseconds of trade execution? Never fear – here comes the TVIX, a levered third derivative bet on volatility: simply said, the TVIX will be the world’s first double leveraged VIX ETF. According to the ETF creator, VelocityShares, "the TVIX and TVIZ ETNs allow traders to manage daily trading risks using a 2x leveraged view on the S&P VIX Short-Term Futures™ Index and S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures™ Index, respectively, while the XIV and ZIV ETNs enable traders to manage daily trading risks using an inverse position on the direction of the volatility indices. The indices were created by Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC, a division of the McGraw Hill-Companies, Inc." Then again, why not just call these what they are: a novel way (brought to you via the synthetic CDO legacy product known as ETFs) to lose money with a 99.999% guarantee. As always, we wonder why anyone would trade this product, when, with much better odds, one would at least get comped in Vegas…
Here is the full product suite about to launched by Credit Suisse.
One has to love the fine print:
The ETNs, and in particular the 2x Long ETNs, are intended to be trading tools for sophisticated investors to manage daily trading risks. They are designed to achieve their stated investment objectives on a daily basis, but their performance over longer periods of time can differ significantly from their stated daily objectives. Investors should actively and frequently monitor their investments in the ETNs. Although we intend to list the ETNs on NYSE Arca, a trading market for the ETNs may not develop.
In this case, and as in everything else related to the market, our advice is stay away from these synthetic contraptions which are merely CDOs (and now CDOs cubed) for public consumption. On the other hand, we can’t wait for someone to finally release an ETF or any other mechanism, that allows for the simple shorting of GM stock.
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Obama No Longer Bothering to Lie Credibly: Claims Financial Crisis Cost Less Than S&L Crisis
by ilene - October 29th, 2010 3:29 pm
Obama No Longer Bothering to Lie Credibly: Claims Financial Crisis Cost Less Than S&L Crisis
Courtesy of Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism
I’m so offended by the latest Obama canard, that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 cost less than 1% of GDP, that I barely know where to begin. Not only does this Administration lie on a routine basis, it doesn’t even bother to tell credible lies. .And this one came directly from the top, not via minions. It’s not that this misrepresentation is earth-shaking, but that it epitomizes why the Obama Administration is well on its way to being an abject failure.
On the Jon Stewart Show (starting roughly at the 1:10 mark on this segment) Obama claims the cost of this crisis will be less than 1% of GDP, versus 2.5% for the savings and loan crisis (hat tip George Washington, sorry, no embed code, you need to go here):
The reason Obama makes such baldfacedly phony statements is twofold: first, his pattern of seeing PR as the preferred solution to all problems, and second, his resulting slavish devotion to smoke and mirrors over sound policy.
The savings & loan crisis led to FDIC takeovers of dud banks and the creation of a resolution authority to dispose of bad assets. That produced costs which were largely funded by the Federal government. I’ve heard economists repeatedly peg the costs at $110 to $120 billion; Wikipedia puts it at about $150 billion. This approach, of cleaning up and resolving banks, has been found repeatedly to be the fastest and least costly way to contend with a financial crisis.
The reason Obama can claim such phony figures is that many of the costs of saving the financial system are hidden, the biggest being the ongoing transfer from savers to banks of negative real interest rates, which is a covert way…
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Currency Wars: Debase, Default, Deny!
by ilene - October 29th, 2010 3:18 am
Currency Wars: Debase, Default, Deny!
Courtesy of Gordon T Long of Tipping Points
In September 2008 the US came to a fork in the road. The Public Policy decision to not seize the banks, to not place them in bankruptcy court with the government acting as the Debtor-in-Possession (DIP), to not split them up by selling off the assets to successful and solvent entities, set the world on the path to global currency wars.
By lowering interest rates and effectively guaranteeing a weak dollar through undisciplined fiscal policy, the US ignited an almost riskless global US$ Carry Trade and triggered an uncontrolled Currency War with the mercantilist, export driven Asian economies. We are now debasing the US dollar with reckless spending and money printing with the policies of Quantitative Easing (QE) and the expectations of QE II. Both are nothing more than effectively defaulting on our obligations to sound money policy and a “strong US$”. Meanwhile with a straight face we deny that this is our intention.
It’s called debase, default and deny.
Though prior to the 2008 financial crisis our largest banks had become casino like speculators with public money lacking in fiduciary responsibility, our elected officials bailed them out. Our leadership placed America and the world unknowingly (knowingly?) on a preordained destructive path because it was politically expedient and the easiest way out of a difficult predicament. By kicking the can down the road our political leadership, like the banks, avoided their fiduciary responsibility. Similar to a parent wanting to be liked and a friend to their children they avoided the difficult discipline that is required at certain critical moments in life. The discipline to make America swallow a needed pill. The discipline to ask Americans to accept a period of intense adjustment. A period that by now would be starting to show signs of success versus the abyss we now find ourselves staring into. A future that is now significantly worse and with potentially fatal pain still to come.
Unemployed Americans, the casualties of the financial crisis wrought by the banks, witness the same banks declaring record earnings while these banks refuse to lend. When the banks once more are caught with their fingers in the cookie jar with falsified robo-signing mortgage title fraud, they again look for the compliant parent to look the other way. Meanwhile the US debt levels and spending associated with protecting these failed…
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The Tombstone Blues
by ilene - October 26th, 2010 2:41 am
The Tombstone Blues
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
The latest version of Pretend – going on a couple of weeks now – is the nation whistling past the graveyard of mortgage documentation fraud while skeletons dance around everything connected with the money system. Halloween came early this year. The USA is getting to look like one big Masque of the Red Death, so I suppose it’s convenient that our pop culture has been saturated with vampires, zombies, and werewolves for a decade, coincident with the self-cannibalizing of our economy. Something in the zeitgeist told us to get with the program of a twilight existence. We’re well-schooled now in the ways of the undead, operating under cover of darkness, going for the neck at every opportunity, even eating our young – if you consider the debt orgy, both private and public, as a way to party like it’s 1999 by consuming your children’s’ future.
The big banks leading the charge of the anthropophagi are making like it’s no big deal that notes representing money lent have become mysteriously dissociated from the mortgages that secure them. In the good old days, these things traveled in pairs, like boy-and-girl, Laurel and Hardy, a horse and carriage. It made for straight-forward property transfers, where Person A could be confident he was buying something free and clear from Person B. What a quaint concept, free and clear!
Nowadays, these documents can hardly be located at all – not such a surprise, really, since they were ground out like e-coli infested bratwursts in strip-mall boiler rooms run by former used car salesmen, and pawned off wholesale (literally) on banks who served them up sliced-and-diced, sloppy Joe style, on CDO buns to credulous pension funds, cretinous insurance company yobs, double-digit IQ college endowment managers, and other such nitwits bethinking themselves the reincarnation of Bernard Baruch, not to mention foreign sovereign nations who bought this smallpox-blanket-grade investment paper by the container-ship-load and, finally, the innovative geniuses at the very banks who engineered the stuff and got stuck with tons of it themselves when, as they say, the music stopped.
The Big Picture looks even worse when you figure in the mischief of so-called synthetic CDOs that represent the multiple securitizations of single underlying mortgages – God knows how many times each – which mean,…
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Food and Finance
by ilene - October 25th, 2010 1:53 pm
High fructose corn syrup, enriched bleached flour, and "natural flavor" is to bread like CDOS, subprime loans and reverse convertibles are to finance. – Ilene
Food and Finance
Courtesy of James Kwak at Baseline Scenario
I just read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Pollan’s account, grossly simplified, goes something like this. The dominant ideology of food in the United States is nutritionism: the idea that food should be thought of in terms of its component nutrients. Food science is devoted to identifying the nutrients in food that make us healthy or unhealthy, and encouraging us to consume more of the former and less of the latter. This is good for nutritional “science,” since you can write papers about omega-3 fatty acids, while it’s very hard to write papers about broccoli.
It’s especially good for the food industry, because nutritionism justifies even more intensive processing of food. Instead of making bread out of flour, yeast, water, and salt, Sara Lee makes “Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread” out of “enriched bleached flour” (seven ingredients), water, “whole grains” (three ingredients), high fructose corn syrup, whey, wheat gluten, yeast, cellulose, honey, calcium sulfate, vegetable oil, salt, butter, dough conditioners (up to seven ingredients), guar gum, calcium propionate, distilled vinegar, yeast nutrients (three ingredients), corn starch, natural flavor [?], betacarotene, vitamin D3, soy lecithin, and soy flour (pp. 151-52). They add a modest amount of whole grains so they can call it “whole grain” bread, and then they add the sweeteners and the dough conditioners to make it taste more like Wonder Bread. Because processed foods sell at higher margins, we have an enormous food industry pushing highly processed food at us, very cheaply (because it’s mainly made out of highly-subsidized corn and soy), which despite its health claims (or perhaps because of them) is almost certainly bad for us, and bad for the environment as well. This has been abetted by the government, albeit perhaps reluctantly, which now allows labels like this on corn oil (pp. 155-56):
“Very limited and preliminary scientific evidence suggests that eating about one tablespoon (16
…
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The Age of Mammon
by ilene - August 30th, 2010 12:09 am
"Never have so few, done so little, and made so much, while screwing so many." Jim Quinn
Courtesy of Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform
The Age of Mammon
“Financiers – like bank robbers – do not create wealth. They merely distribute it. While the mob may idolize holdup men in good times, in the bad times it lynches them. What they will do to the new money men when their blood is up, we wait eagerly to find out.” - Mobs, Messiahs and Markets
As our economy hurtles towards its meeting with destiny, the political class seeks to assign blame on their enemies for this Greater Depression. The Republicans would like you to believe that Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank and their Community Reinvest Act caused the collapse of our financial system. Democrats want you to believe that George Bush and his band of unregulated free market capitalists created a financial disaster of epic proportions. The truth is that America has been captured by a financial class that makes no distinction between parties. These barbarians have sucked the life out of a once productive nation by raping and pillaging with impunity while enriching only them. They live in 20,000 square foot $10 million mansions in Greenwich, CT and in $3 million dollar penthouses on Central Park West.
These are the robber barons that represent the Age of Mammon. The greed, avarice, gluttony and acute materialism of these American traitors has not been seen in this country since the 1920′s. The hedge fund managers and Wall Street bank executives that occupy the mansions and penthouses evidently don’t find much time to read the bible in their downtime from raping and pillaging the wealth of the middle class. There are cocktail parties and $5,000 a plate political “fundraisers” to attend. You can’t be cheap when buying off your protection in Washington DC.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You…
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Deciphering Joe Cassno’s Lies Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
by ilene - July 11th, 2010 8:13 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge
Submitted by David Fiderer
Deciphering Joe Cassno’s Lies Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
Joe Cassano is a very good liar, which is why it would be so hard to prosecute him for perjury. When testifying before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the former head of AIG Financial Products kept blending in half-truths with his audaciously dishonest claims, so that the overall effect was nonsensical. For instance, to justify his outrageous claim that, "the books were generally considered fully hedged," he explained that "we were using it basically in actuarial basis …[so] it’s not hedged in the conventional sense." (Translation: The book was never hedged in any sense. Nor was there any actuarial analysis, only a reliance on triple-A credit ratings.) These rhetorical tricks were designed to throw sand in everyone’s face. But his tactics seem to have worked. The staunchly unregenerate Cassano framed a media narrative that deflected away from his dishonesty and gross incompetence.
Here’s a reality check on some of his more ridiculous claims, in order of appearance:
1. Cassanos’s Claim: AIGFP never compromised its high underwriting standards.
The Truth: AIGFP had no underwriting standards pertaining to the most important risk, which affected AIG’s liquidity.
Commission Chairman Phil Angelides asked Cassano if he understood the subprime risks he insured. Cassano stonewalled with a lot of doubletalk:
Angelides: I want to talk to you about this, that these were represented as multisector CDOs. But if you look at — we did a sample of some of these in 2004, 2005, 2006, they were almost overwhelmingly residential-backed and very substantially subprime. For example, in the survey we did of some of these CDOs that you issued protection on, 84 percent were backed by RMBS residential mortgages in ’05, 89 percent in ’06. And just as an example, while you indicated you decided to stop writing on subprime instruments in January of ’06, for example, you backed an instrument called RFC III where that CDO was 93 percent subprime and seven percent HELOC home equity loans.
My question for you, Mr. Cassano, is was there — you said you did thorough due diligence. Were you aware of the quality of the mortgages? Do you do direct analysis of the loan data? Were you confident that you had a full understanding of the nature of what you were backing?
…
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The Financial Crisis Is Everywhere a Fraud, and Official Complacency Inevitably Leads to a Crisis
by ilene - July 1st, 2010 4:02 pm
The Financial Crisis Is Everywhere a Fraud, and Official Complacency Inevitably Leads to a Crisis
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
"A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability." Robert F. Kennedy, 9 May 1966
The Fed is now engaged in a control fraud, and what appears to be racketeering in conjunction with a few big investment banks. They may have entered into it with good intentions, but they seem to have been turned towards deceit and corruption.
This is not an historical event, but an ongoing theft in conjunction with a number of Wall Street banks, and politicians whom they have paid off through a corrupt system of campaign financing and influence peddling.
This is nothing new in history if one reads the unsanitized version. But people never think it can happen today, that somehow yesterday things were different, as if one is looking at some distant, foreign land. This is a facet of the illusion of general progress.
Audit the Fed. Vote out incumbents until they give you what you demand. Take back the billions stolen through millionaire’s taxes similar to those in place before the ‘Reagan Revolution.’ If there is no profit in theft, it will not happen. EU Puts Tough Restrictions on Banker’s Bonuses.
The individuals in government are not a ruling class, and were never intended to be, although after a second term they start to feel themselves to be privileged, with better pensions and benefits and pay raises than the people whom they serve. These are your chosen representatives, sworn to uphold the law and governing with your consent. The United States is not the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive in Washington, it is the people joined freely by their mutual consent under the Constitution. It is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Goldman Sachs, AIG, and the NY Fed are at the heart of it. Everyone in the government, the media, and on the Street knows this. We are now in the coverup stage of a scandal, similar to Watergate when the White House was stone-walling. The difference is that the corruption and capture of the government…
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Criminal Indictments / Goldman Sachs’s Alleged Fraud / Financial Reform
by ilene - July 1st, 2010 2:28 pm
VIDEO: Criminal Indictments / Goldman Sachs’s Alleged Fraud / Financial Reform
Courtesy of Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance
CBCs Lang and O’Leary Exchange – April 29, 2010
Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based firm that provides consulting to financial institutions and institutional investors. Ms. Tavakoli has more than 20 years of experience in senior investment banking positions, trading, structuring and marketing structured financial products. She is a former adjunct associate professor of derivatives at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. Author of: Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures (1998, 2001), Collateralized Debt Obligations & Structured Finance (2003), Structured Finance &Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, September 2008). Tavakoli’s book on the causes of the global financial meltdown and how to fix it is: Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street (Wiley, 2009).
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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